1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system and a method for communication with terminals in telecommunications network, and especially providing means for notifying a person, that other persons are devoting their attention to that person.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent studies have shown that telecommunication terminals, such as phones, and especially mobile phones or other types of mobile communication terminals, are not only used for communicating information between individuals, but also for creating a feeling of togetherness and friendship. People often send messages, such as email, short messages, or voice mail, to each other just to “keep the line open” between them, i.e., to remind one another to stay in touch and to make the receiver of the message aware that she is personally significant to the sender of the message. Especially close friends and family members appreciate these types of messages because of the knowledge that the message senders are thinking about them.
These studies have also shown that people, and especially teenagers, attach a special emotional meaning to electronically-represented data objects, such as received email messages, phonebook entries and avatars, that they associate with particular persons to whom they feel an affinity. The persons who maintain these data objects on their terminals view, read, arrange, save, access, and/or otherwise activate the data objects to recreate their social world.
Present messaging solutions do not optimally support the sending of these kinds of messages because these solutions require a user to create message content, whereas the building of a bond or link between individuals calls for solutions that are more intimate and more integrated to other forms of emotional thinking. Messaging solutions are needed for bonding or linking people with each other without requiring a cognitive effort of creating substantive content/information, such as a written message, to be prepared by one or more of the people and then sent to the other people to whom one desires to bond or “link”.
In a communication terminal, and particularly a mobile communication terminal, there are several ways in which other people may be electronically “represented” by a data object. These include an entry in an electronic phonebook or on an electronic contact card, and textual, voice, picture and video messages received from that person and stored in and/or displayed on the device.
In present solutions, the two phenomena described above, namely, communication to increase the bonding of people without requiring the creation of content and considering data objects as emotional representations of a person, are separate and independent, although in some users' minds and actions these phenomena are highly interrelated. Linking the activation of the data objects associated with an individual in a communication terminal with emotional, cohesion building messaging toward that particular person would enhance the emotional meaning of telecommunication.
Currently, the telecommunication field is heavily focused on communication of information content using interfaces that primarily provide audio and visible output. The field is less focused on applications that offer other types of outputs such as a tactile output to be generated as part of a silent call or a message announcement. Communicating emotional cohesion seeking behavior with a tactile universal interface (UI) would add a whole new dimension to mobile communication.
Email applications have features which enable a sender of a message to receive a reply email message notifying the message sender when a sent message has been opened by the recipient. However, existing email programs provide a notification only when the message is opened for the first time and the message provided is only a text message to be viewed on a display rather than some other less intrusive notification means that can use a different medium other than text on a display to provides a notification. Also, the existing email notification system is an asynchronous “pull” system in which the person who receives notification needs to download the content of her inbox (whereas an emotional notification optimally requires a real-time “push” of information sent directly to the terminal). As such, existing email programs are not designed to support the emotional cohesion of mutually significant persons.